Healthy Chicken Soup with Vegetables and Noodles
The news is filled with all kinds of scary flu stories, flu shot shortages and media hysteria bordering on panic in the streets. Phffft! Baloney. Swine flu, chicken flu, Hong Kong, King Kong, or Ho Chi Min, the flu is the flu I don’t care what fancy name you put on it. The flu, common colds and all sorts of transmuting bugs and viruses, get a toe hold in your body when your immune system isn’t up to snuff. If you are stressed out (and who isn’t in this economy?), not getting enough sleep or exercise (or both), not eating right and not washing your hands often enough, you are a target for ugly bugs. The best way to keep the flu away, in my humble opinion, is to eat Chicken Soup with plenty of onions and garlic and a load of vegetables. Onions and garlic are great anti-viral, anti-fungal and anti-bacterial agents. They are the front runners in my personal anti-cootie campaign.
Is Chicken Soup hard to make? Nah. It’s fast and it’s easy and it’s healthy. Here’s the basic recipe:
1 tbs. of olive oil
2 tbs. of butter
1 onion, chopped fairly fine
2 carrots, peeled and sliced rather thin
2 stalks of celery, cleaned and sliced
1-2 cloves of garlic, mashed or minced
1 zucchini, ends chopped off, and quartered
1 bay leaf
1 1/2 qts. of Chicken Stock or Broth (homemade is best. If you don’t have any, shoot for Organic)
1 cup or more left over cooked chicken, shredded or diced (those supermarket chickens work wonders)
1 tsp. of chicken soup base (Better Than Bouillon Organic Chicken Base is a good brand)
1/4 bag of egg noodles or 1 cup of left-over rice (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
The onions, carrots and celery are known in French as Mire Poix. It is the absolute necessary ingredient in soup and stews. If you don’t want to chop the onions, carrots and vegetables yourself, Trader Joe’s has mire poix in the cold section where all the salad stuff is located. Go buy that.
Take a 3 or 4 quart pot and turn on the heat to high. Add the olive oil. When it’s hot, add the butter. When the butter is melted, add the mire poix. Stir to coat the veggies then turn down the heat to low. We are going to “sweat” these veggies for about 20 minutes to bring out their sweetness. It adds depth to the soup and a load of flavor. Keep your eye on the pot and stir now and then. Just make sure it doesn’t burn. Burn taste kinds sucks in soup.
Once the mire poix is done, add the Chicken Stock, the bay leaf and the garlic and turn up the heat. When the stock begins to boil add the chicken soup base and stir to incorporate. I like Penzeys or Better Than Bouillon Organic Chicken Base (which you can find at most grocery stores). The soup base deepens the flavor otherwise you’d be cooking that chicken soup for hours and hours. Consider this a short-cut.
Add the chicken. You can strip off breast and thigh meat from a roasted chicken from the grocery store. I happen to like Zupan’s roasted chickens. They’re a bit more expensive than Fred Meyer but a very good quality. But hey, this is chicken soup so don’t freak out if you end up at say, Safeway, for the chicken. Just throw in cooked chicken, okay? Reduce heat and simmer for about 30 minutes.
After 30 minutes, add the zucchini. You can add other vegetables, too. Look for packages of Organic frozen veggies and add maybe half a bag. If there’s more vegetables than soup, add some water to cover the veggies. The zucchini will get soft after about a half an hour.
Now, you’ve got some choices here. If you want noodles, this is the time to add them. Just simmer away until they are done. If you want rice, cook it first. White rice takes about 15 minutes to prep separately. Add it after the zucchini has cooked. Or you can opt out entirely from adding any starch. Starch, like noodles and rice, just make the soup more filling.
After everything is done, taste it. If it needs salt and pepper add some. We waited until all the soup was made because commercial stock, store-bought roasted chicken and the soup base all contain salt and pepper. The thing about salt is you can always add a bit more to taste but if you add too much you are screwed.
At any time during the process you need to add liquid, go ahead and add water. The soup base will keep the flavor of the soup nice and deep and not thin.
If you are using a roasted chicken from the super market, don’t throw out that carcas. You can use it to make stock.
Okay, now make a nice green salad and slice some sourdough bread or rolls and you’ve got lunch or dinner. And a healthy way to keep the flu at bay. Pffft on flu shots. Make yourself healthy.
Yum, yum. Let’s eat!